CAUSE: He died aged 80 from a stroke in Beverly Hills, California.
Louella O. Parsons
(LOUELLA ROSE OETTINGER)
Born August 6, 1881
Died December 9, 1972
The reel wicked witch of the West. Like her rival Hedda Hopper, the ‘Paganini of Piffle’ Louella O. Parsons utilised obfuscation when it came to her origins. Hedda changed the year and month of her birth but only attempted to make herself five years younger than she really was. Louella practised a chronological deceit that even the Gabors would have to admire. She knocked a staggering 12 years off her true age and even reputable, usually thoroughly researched, tomes like Katz accept, wrongly, that she was born in 1893. She was born the oldest of five children, three of whom died in infancy, in Freeport, Illinois. On May 26, 1890, further tragedy entered her life when her father died, aged 31, of ‘brain congestion’, thereby making her claimed date of birth impossible. At school she reviewed musicals and social events for various publications. She landed a job on a newspaper and met John Dement Parsons. They married on Hallowe’en 1905. He was 32 and she gave her age as 24. Had her natal day really occurred in 1893 she would have married for the first time aged 12 and, no doubt, her husband would have ended up in prison on a charge of paedophilia. On August 23, 1906 (not 1911 as Katz has it), she gave birth to their daughter, Harriet Oettinger Parsons, later to become a film producer. (She died in 1983.) Louella was employed by Essanay in Chicago when her husband left her for his secretary. A mysterious second husband came into her life in the early part of the second decade of the twentieth century. Captain Jack McCaffery (b. Le Claire, Iowa, March 21, 1873) and Louella were married circa 1915, although no marriage certificate has ever surfaced. Louella had risen from script reader to scenarist at Essanay on a salary of $45 a week when she was made redundant in an economy drive. She found a job working on the Chicago Record-Herald revealing movie gossip, although exactly when is impossible to determine because very few copies of the newspaper exist in Chicago public libraries and the copies in Louella’s scrapbook are undated thanks to her judicious wielding of a pair of scissors. Her early columns show an eye for the cynical and an eagerness to reveal manipulation by press agents. That soon disappeared as Louella realised that the truth was not what the public wanted to hear. A move to the New York Morning Telegraph followed on June 9, 1918, when the motion-picture editor received his call-up papers. Louella began to network, cultivating people she believed would be useful to her. On November 19, 1923, she joined William Randolph Hearst’s New York American as motion picture editor. For the next 30 or so years she rose to become one of the most feared columnists in American journalism. One wrong word from Louella could wreck a career, a puff piece in her column could raise the stock of any actor. She often feuded with Hedda Hopper and canny stars were careful not to show favouritism to either. Parsons married Dr Harry Watson ‘Docky’ Martin (b. Redfield, South Dakota, January 16, 1890, d. Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, Los Angeles, June 24, 1951) on January 5, 1930. Martin, a hopeless drunk, had a sideline. He was the unofficial doctor at Madame Lee Frances’ brothel and Hollywood’s most popular ‘clap doctor’, an ‘in’ that Louella exploited to the max. Louella was aboard Hearst’s yacht, the Oneida, when film director Thomas Ince was mortally shot and she became part of the cover-up that ensued. Parsons would also plug Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, in her column whenever the need arose. Louella appeared as herself in a number of films including Hollywood Hotel (1937) and Starlift (1951). Her column may have been essential reading but she also exposed her own prejudices in it, referring to black actors as ‘pickaninnies’ and revealing that her all-time hero was Mussolini.
CAUSE: In September 1964 Louella fell and broke her hip and was hospitalised for 15 days. That year she retired from writing her column and moved from her mansion at 619 Maple Drive, Beverly Hills, into a nursing home. She died, senile and incontinent, of generalised arteriosclerosis aged 91. She was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery & Mausoleum, 5835 West Slauson Avenue, Culver City, California 90230.
FURTHER READING: Hedda And Louella – George Eells (London: W.H. Allen, 1972).
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Born March 5, 1922
Died November 2, 1975
A thorn in Italy’s side. Born in Bologna, Italy, Pasolini was a film maker, a poet, a novelist, a Marxist and a proselytising homosexual. He began writing films in 1955, his first being Prigioniero Della Montagna (1955) and La Donna Del Fiume (1955). However, he really caused a stir when he began directing six years later. His first film was Accattone (1961) on which Bernardo Bertolucci was assistant director. The film was a look at the dark side of the Italian capital. Many of his films were blatant in their use of blasphemy, sex and violence to make a point. He followed Accattone up with Mamma Roma (1962), La Rabbia (1963), Comizi D’Amore (1964), Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo/The Gospel According To St Matthew (1964), in which he cast his mother as the Virgin Mary, and a Marxist lorry driver as Jesus, Il Padre Selvaggio (1965), Edipo Re/Oedipus Rex (1967), which was filmed in Morocco, Teorema (1968), Porcile /Pigsty (1969), Il Decameron (1970), I Racconti Di Canterbury/The Canterbury Tales (1971) in which he also played Geoffrey Chaucer and the most violent Salò O Le 120 Giornate Di Sodoma/The 120 Days Of Sodom (1975).
CAUSE: Pasolini was murdered, aged 53, by a 17-year-old boy whom he had propositioned in Ostia, Italy. The teenager bludgeoned the director to death and then ran him over with his own Alfa Romeo. However, some, including Bertolucci, believe Pasolini was killed for political reasons.
Charles Pathé
Born December 25, 1863
Died December 25, 1957
The news man. The son of a pork butcher and a cook, Pathé was born in Chevry-Cossigny, France, and quickly rose to become one of the early giants of cinema. In 1894 he bought and exhibited an Edison phonograph and began selling them. Two years later, he founded Pathé Frères with his brothers and they began selling projectors. In 1901 he bought a studio and produced documentaries. He expanded the business to include film stock, processing laboratories and cinemas. He launched the world’s first newsreel for general distribution, Pathé-Journal, in 1908 in Paris under the directorship of Albert Gaveau. By 1908 Pathé was the world’s largest film producer with interests in London, New York, Moscow and many other cities. He sold more films to America than America produced. Following the end of World War I, America began to assert itself as a film-maker and Pathé began to sell off parts of his empire. In 1929 he sold the last remnants and retired to the Riviera.
CAUSE: He died on his 94th birthday in Monte Carlo, Monaco, of natural causes.
Barbara Payton
(BARBARA REDFIELD)
Born November 16, 1927
Died May 8, 1967
Flamboyant blonde. Born in Cloquet, Minnesota (also the birthplace of Jessica Lange), Barbara Payton was a beautiful, leggy teenager who shocked her parents by marrying when she was still in junior high school. That marriage was quickly annulled but on February 10, 1945, she married again, this time to air force pilot John Payton. Their honeymoon was spent in Hollywood where Barbara wangled a screen test with RKO. However, before the test she discovered she was pregnant. She later suffered a miscarriage though a son, John Lee, would be born in 1947. In 1948, with her marriage over, she travelled back to RKO but found that the studio was no longer interested in her, so she signed for Universal-International at a rate of $100 a week. She made a few films and began to date lawyer Greg Bautzer but the affair ended when she was cast as Meg Dixon, alias Laurie Fredericks in Trapped (1949). Her film Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950) in which she played Holiday Carleton was well received. She began to date Franchot Tone and they announced their engagement at New York’s Stork Club, despite opposition from many of his friends and ex-wife Joan Crawford. She was Flo in Dallas (1950) and had an affair with leading man Gary Cooper. Maintaining her track record of sleeping with the leading man, she made Only The Valiant (1951) playing Cathy Eversham and bedded the star G
regory Peck. That year she was chosen as one of the six most promising starlets by the Hollywood Press Association. She also became involved in an unsavoury court case that displeased Warner Bros. She made Drums In The Deep South (1951) as Kathy Summers and, true to form, became romantically involved with the married star Guy Madison. Franchot Tone, still deeply in love with Barbara, had hired a private detective to keep track of her movements and he discovered her and Madison in flagrante at her second-floor home at 7456 Hollywood Boulevard. She then met actor Tom Neal and dumped Tone for him and then changed her mind and went back to Tone. On September 13, 1951, she and Tone were together at her new apartment, 1803 Courtney Terrace, when Neal burst in and gave Tone a good hiding. As a result of the assault, Tone suffered a broken nose, fractured cheekbone and concussion, spent a fortnight in the California Lutheran Hospital and later had to undergo plastic surgery. Fifteen days later, Barbara and Tone were married in Cloquet. She was 23 years old and on her third marriage. After a 72-hour honeymoon Barbara began work on Lady In The Iron Mask but was sacked and replaced by Patricia Medina (Joseph Cotten’s wife). After 53 days, she and Tone called it a day and she went back to the thuggish Tom Neal. Mindful of Neal’s temper, she went back to Tone briefly, but left him again. In March 1952 she attempted suicide but was found in time by Tone. Despite this they divorced in May 1952, due to her ‘extreme mental cruelty’. She appeared in Bride Of The Gorilla (1951) as Mrs Dina Van Gelder, though this time she didn’t have a fling with her leading man (Raymond Burr) because he was gay. She also didn’t have a contract when Warner Bros decided not to pick up her option. In October 1952 she became involved in yet another imbroglio. “I became good friends with Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. We three were in Palm Springs together,” remembered Barbara. “We were drinking and lying around with not many clothes on and talking about things. Ava was married to Frank Sinatra in those days. He was screaming crazy about her. Well, he didn’t approve of the way we were carrying on like that, and one night he came in and caught us all together. Well, I jumped out of the window and into the bushes but he caught Lana and Ava together and he was mad as hell. It got into the gossip columns and contributed to the end of their marriage.” For The Great Jesse James Raid (1953), in which she portrayed Kate, it was okay for her to sleep with her leading man for it was Tom Neal. She moved to England where she made Four-Sided Triangle (1953), playing the dual role of Lena Maitland and her duplicate Helen. Her second film was The Flanagan Boy (1953) as Lorna Vecchi before she returned to America. Her last film, Murder Is My Beat (1955) as Eden Lane, was probably one of her best. Then it all went horribly wrong. In October 1955 she was arrested for passing rubber cheques to buy alcohol. She married furniture salesman George A. Provas and moved to Nogales, Arizona, but they divorced in August 1958. She moved back to Hollywood and was arrested for drunkenness and prostitution. In her last years she worked washing hair in a hairdresser’s and as a waitress in downmarket clubs before moving to Nevada.
CAUSE: She married for the fifth time, to Jess Rawley but that, too, failed and, in April 1967, she went to stay with her parents at their home, 1901 Titus Street, San Diego, California. By this time her liver had failed, her skin was yellow and blotchy, she had put on weight and some of her front teeth had fallen out. Her father discovered her corpse on the bathroom floor. She had died of heart and liver failure. She was 39.
Gregory Peck
Born April 5, 1916
Died June 12, 2003
Rangy good guy. In 1880 Catherine Ashe, a 16-year-old from Dingle, County Kerry, emigrated to Rochester, New York, where she met and married Samuel Peck, who was of English descent. He died young of diphtheria and Catherine took her 11-month-old son Gregory back to Ireland. When Gregory was 10 he and his mother went back to America where the determined woman made a fortune selling corsets. She gave her son $10,000 to set up a chemist’s in La Jolla, California. He married Bernice ‘Bunny’ Ayres, a girl from St Louis who became a Roman Catholic. Their son Eldred Gregory Peck was born at La Jolla in the spring of 1916. His unusual Christian name was chosen at random by his mother from the phone book. Not long after his birth the chemist’s went bust, the marriage failed and his mother took him back to St Louis. (His mother was to marry a salesman called Joseph Maysuch né Masucci.) Returning to La Jolla, he was brought up by his father and grandmother and educated at San Diego High School and St John’s Military Academy, Los Angeles, where he later recalled, “I was laminated with virtue by tough Irish nuns and square-jawed army officers. I was lonely, withdrawn and full of self-doubt. I could never remember a time when I sat down to dinner with my mother and my father. What I decided to do – what I had to do – was to run my own life because there was no one else to do it for me. I grew like corn in the moonlight.” He got his first job at 18 driving an oil lorry in nearby San Diego, before going to the University of California at Berkeley to read medicine. At university he changed his course and took a degree in English. His free time was divided between rowing (at which he represented the university) and acting. In 1939 Peck moved to New York to train at the Playhouse School of Dramatics. In 1941 he joined the Cape Playhouse at Cape Cod. The following year he played on Broadway opposite Jill Esmond (Laurence Olivier’s lesbian first wife) in Emlyn Williams’ Morning Star with the New York Neighborhood Playhouse. In the spring of 1941 he took a screen test at the Fox studios on 10th Avenue and 57th Street but it was not successful. Said David O. Selznick, “He photographs like Abe Lincoln but if he has a great personality, I don’t think it comes through in the tests.” Peck decided his future lay in the theatre but when America belatedly entered the Second World War, Peck was turned down for military service because of a spinal injury supposedly suffered as a student during a rowing accident. However, at the Neighborhood Playhouse, he was taught movement by Martha Graham, who, he insisted, gave him the back injury that kept him out of uniform. Later, 20th Century Fox claimed that the cause was a rowing injury. “In Hollywood, they didn’t think a dance class was macho enough, I guess. I’ve been trying to straighten out that story for years,” Peck explained. With many of his contemporaries fighting overseas he was cast as Vladimir, a Russian partisan, in Casey Robinson’s Days Of Glory (1944), opposite the Russian ballerina Tamara Toumanova, Robinson’s fiancée, for $1,000 a week. Toumanova had such a thick Russian accent that the only way to make any sense of the dialogue was to have the entire cast speak in a similar fashion. His next film saw him play Father Francis Chisholm in The Keys Of The Kingdom (1944) in a 20th Century Fox adaptation of A.J. Cronin’s novel about a Scottish Roman Catholic priest in China. It won him his first Best Actor Oscar nomination. Soon everyone wanted a piece of Gregory Peck. He was Paul Scott, a handsome steel magnate, in The Valley Of Decision (1945) opposite Greer Garson. Then he played John Ballantine, the amnesiac head of a mental hospital cured by Ingrid Bergman’s psychiatrist in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). In King Vidor’s Duel In The Sun (1946) he was Lewton McCanles, the leering and sarcastic seducer of Jennifer Jones. In The Yearling (1946) he was Pa Baxter, a father who has to kill his son’s pet deer. The part won him his second Best Actor Oscar nomination. In Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) Peck played Phil Green, a journalist who pretended to be Jewish to root out racial prejudice for a series of magazine articles. He took the role although his agent warned him, “You’re just establishing yourself and a lot of people will resent the picture. Anti-semitism runs deep in this country.” The film garnered him his third Best Actor Oscar nomination and made him one of America’s Top 10 box office stars and the recipient of a prodigious amount of fan mail, said to be 3,000 letters a week. “Please let me spend the night with you,” women would write. “You can do what you will with me. It would make my dreams come true.” “I’m all booked up,” his secretary would reply. The Paradine Case (1947) found Peck as Anthony Keene, once again working for Alfred Hitchcock as a British barrister, whose judgement is disastrously warped by his beautiful client (Alida Valli), on trial for murdering her husba
nd. Peck disappointed and it is regarded as Hitchcock’s worst film. In The Great Sinner (1949), a film inspired at some remove by Dostoevsky, he appeared as Fedja, a young writer who becomes a compulsive gambler. His fourth Academy Award nomination came for playing the dithering General Frank Savage, the commander of an American bomber unit who is obliged to send his crews to their deaths over Nazi Germany in Twelve O’Clock High (1949), his third 20th Century Fox role to be so appreciated. Still with the armed forces, he took the lead in Captain Horatio Hornblower RN (1951) and stayed at sea in Raoul Walsh’s The World In His Arms (1952), this time as Jonathan Clark, a seal pirate in Alaska. He was Commander Dwight Lionel Towers of the USS Sawfish, a submarine commander on the brink of nuclear war with Ava Gardner in On The Beach (1959). Back on dry land he was Lieutenant Joe Clemons, a platoon commander with a conscience, in Pork Chop Hill (1959), and the honourable Captain Keith Mallory in The Guns Of Navarone (1961). Peck certainly had versatility. In Yellow Sky (1948) he played James ‘Stretch’ Dawson, the leader of a gang of robbers who are chased into a salt flat after holding up a bank. In The Gunfighter (1950) he was brilliant as Johnny Ringo, simultaneously weary of shooting upstarts slower on the draw and haunted by the eventual certainty of death at the hands of a younger man. He played the lead opposite Susan Hayward in David And Bathsheba (1951), a film which, according to one critic, gained “hardly a single intentional laugh”. He was cast because Darryl F. Zanuck thought he had “a biblical face”. He was Harry Street, an injured hunter contemplating his lot, in The Snows Of Kilimanjaro (1952), a popular film based on various writings by Ernest Hemingway. In Roman Holiday (1953) Peck was at his most beguiling as Joe Bradley, an American journalist who determines to get a story from Audrey Hepburn’s princess. Although his contract stipulated that his name should appear on its own above the title, he cabled the studio in Hollywood, saying, “Audrey Hepburn is going to be a big star. Put her name alongside mine. That is where it belongs.” In The Purple Plain (1954) Peck was Squadron Leader Bill Forrester whose plane had crashed in the Burmese jungle. He made a respectable fist of playing Captain Ahab in John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956). In The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit (1956) Peck was Tom Rath, a New York executive who looks back on his wartime adultery before deciding that his first loyalty lies with wife and children. Then came Vincente Minnelli’s Designing Woman (1957), a comedy in which he played Mike Hagen, where Lauren Bacall (Marilla Brown Hagen) tipped a plate of spaghetti in his lap. In Willie Wyler’s The Big Country (1958) Peck was James McKay, a retired, wealthy sea captain who rose above all sorts of provocation before he finally became involved in a savage fight with Charlton Heston (Steve Leech). The plot of the film turned on a battle for land – a subject dear to the heart of Peck, who owned no fewer than seven cattle ranches. Not all of his films were successful. He once commented, “When I’m wrongly cast I sink with the ship.” 6́ 3˝ Peck was one of the first actors to take on the studio system in Hollywood and win. Peck was taken to the office of Louis B. Mayer to be flattered into signing a contract. Mayer told him what he had done for the careers of Mickey Rooney, Spencer Tracy, Robert Montgomery, Judy Garland and many more. Peck stood firm, and told him he had no intention of signing an exclusive contract for anyone. As Mayer went on, Peck remembered, a strong note of emotion entered his voice. “He pulled out a handkerchief and began to weep to think I wouldn’t allow him to make me the greatest star of all time. My refusal to sign was portrayed as an offence to American motherhood, patriotism and family decency. It was an extraordinary performance.” Fortunately, Peck had an instinct for a good script. The one film he regretted turning down was High Noon. Other, less remarkable Westerns in which he appeared were Only The Valiant (1951) as Captain Richard Lance, The Bravados (1958) as Jim Douglass with Joan Collins, How The West Was Won (1962) as Cleve Van Valen, Mckenna’s Gold (1969) as Mckenna, John Frankenheimer’s I Walk The Line (1970) as Sheriff Harry Tawes opposite Tuesday Weld, Shoot Out (1971) as Clay Lomax and Billy Two Hats (1974) as Arch Deans. He attempted, disastrously, to impersonate Scott Fitzgerald in Beloved Infidel (1959) before getting back on track as Sam Bowden being threatened by Robert Mitchum in the original Cape Fear (1962). Robert Mulligan’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1962), based on Harper Lee’s best-selling novel, which won him his only Oscar for playing Atticus Finch, a white lawyer defending a black man against rape charges in Thirties Alabama, was Peck’s last great film. The comedy Captain Newman MD (1963), in which he played Captain Josiah J. Newman opposite Tony Curtis, failed to light up the screen. Behold A Pale Horse (1964) presented him, rather unconvincingly, as Manuel Artiguez, a Spanish loyalist. The comedy thrillers, Mirage (1965) in which he played David Stillwell and Arabesque (1966) as David Pollock with Sophia Loren, represented some improvement, but The Chairman (1969), in which Peck played John Hathaway, a scientist on a mission to Red China, was a feeble offering. Marooned (1970), which found him as Charles Keith, a space mission controller, was an even bigger flop. In the mid-Seventies Peck turned unsuccessfully to producing. It was perhaps in desperation that he accepted a part that Charlton Heston had declined in The Omen (1976). As Robert Thorn, the American ambassador in London, he is persuaded that he has to stab to death his (adopted) son, who is demonically possessed, on a sacrificial altar with a special set of daggers. In MacArthur The Rebel General (1977), Peck played the soldier who loses his command rather than conform to presidential orders; he caught MacArthur’s intelligence but not the general’s overwhelming pride and lunacy. In The Boys From Brazil (1978) Peck was evil scientist Josef Mengele, a Nazi in hiding from Jewish revenge but still harbouring schemes of world domination. Peck tried a British accent as Colonel Lewis Pugh in The Sea Wolves: The Last Charge Of The Calcutta Light Horse (1980), directing a raid by fellow army veterans on a German spy ship. In Amazing Grace And Chuck (1987) he played the American president, while in Old Gringo (1989) he attempted a portrait of the American satirist Ambrose Bierce, who vanished in New Mexico during the Revolution of 1914. Having avoided television for much of his career he turned up as President Abraham Lincoln in The Blue And The Gray (1982) and The Scarlet And The Black (1983) as Monsignor Hugh Flaherty. He appeared again in The Portrait (1993) as Gardner Church and in 1998 he returned to Moby Dick, playing the part of Father Mapple in a television adaptation of the novel that won him a Golden Globe. On the big screen his late appearances included the modern version of Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), this time playing a shady lawyer called Lee Heller; the same year he appeared as Andrew Jorgenson in Other People’s Money. Two years later, he resumed the part of Atticus Finch in the short film Passage A L’Acte, which dealt with an American family warring at the breakfast table. From 1967 to 1970 Peck was President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He insisted that the 1968 Oscars be delayed as a mark of respect to the recently assassinated Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. When Richard M. Nixon was in the White House Peck found himself on the president’s enemies list. He was also chairman of the trustees of the American Film Institute, which he had helped to found, and in 1966 served as chairman of the American Cancer Society. Gregory Peck married first, in a Lutheran church on Fifth Avenue, New York, in October 1942, Greta Konen Rice, a petite Finnish-born blonde divorcée four years his senior, who served as hairdresser in the touring company in which he acted. They had three sons, Jonathan (b. July 20, 1944), Stephen (b. August 16, 1946) and Carey Paul (b. June 17, 1949). Jonathan looked and sounded like his father. Rather than acting he became a television and radio journalist. He killed himself with a shotgun aged 30 in June 1975 in Santa Barbara, California. Peck was later to say, “When that happens, you blame yourself. What went wrong? Was I responsible? Jonathan had a failed love affair [with a missionary’s wife who was an ardent fan of his father’s, only for her to call out “Gregory” at the moment of climax], he had been ill and was depressed from overwork, but you never get over a thing like that. I still think – what would Jonathan be doing now?” Peck and Greta divorced on December 30, 19
54, amid allegations of “extreme cruelty” and “grievous mental suffering”. When Greta Peck appeared before Los Angeles Superior Court, she accused Peck of causing her “anguish, embarrassment and humiliation” and of treating her in a “cruel and inhuman manner”. The statement went on, “He has pursued a course of conduct towards his wife of such character as to constitute extreme cruelty. He has caused her to endure grievous mental suffering, extreme nervousness, and she can no longer live with him as his wife.” Peck denied the cruelty charge but did not contest the divorce, and Greta was awarded one of the largest settlements in Hollywood history. As well as custody of their sons, she received half their property – including Peck’s beloved house in the Pacific Palisades – and substantial financial interests in three of his films, including Roman Holiday and Moby Dick. She was also awarded 20 per cent of the first $100,000 he earned annually for the next ten years, 12.5 per cent on the second $100,000, and so on through a complicated and generous sliding scale. Even after the ten years were up, she was to receive five per cent of his earnings until she remarried (which she never did) along with monthly cheques for each child. Peck married secondly, on December 31, 1955, Veronique Passani, whom he had met when she interviewed him for France Soir. When he telephoned her at Paris Presse a few months later to suggest a visit to the races, she abandoned an interview with Albert Schweitzer to accept. She was supposed to be interviewing Schweitzer, who was lunching with French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre. She calculated that she could fit in the interview and arrive to join Peck at the fourth race. But Schweitzer and Sartre lingered over lunch so long that finally, as she put it, “Dr Schweitzer and my career lost.” They had a son and a daughter, Anthony (b. October 24, 1956) and Cecilia (b. May 1958), both actors. On November 23, 1990, Tony Peck married the beautiful 5́ 10˝ model Cheryl Tiegs (b. Breckinridge, Minnesota, September 25, 1947), nine years his senior (he was her third husband), and had one son Zachary who was born on October 1, 1991. The couple were divorced in 1994. Tony Peck suffered from drinking problems. The modern films Hollywood was producing did not appeal to Gregory Peck. “People don’t believe in heroes of the sort I used to play. They don’t believe in someone who can be depended upon. This is not the age for good guys.”
Fade to Black: A Book of Movie Obituaries Page 137